toptable.com

Targeted lifecycle emails increase bookings from defectors by 1,600%

toptable.com

toptable.com are Europe’s largest restaurant booking site seating 3M diners a year at over 20,000 restaurants across 14 countries. Diners can choose from numerous Michelin-Starred restaurants, celebrity chefs, local bistros and high street chains.

The Challenge

A significant proportion of toptable customer’s either never establish a habit or lose the habit of using the site to make restaurant bookings. This leaves a huge untapped base of potential customers. To counter this within their email newsletter toptable ran a number of free meal promotions at regular intervals. However this proved costly as regular customers also took advantage of these offers and the email recipients who had already defected from toptable were less receptive to the promotions anyway.
toptable needed to reach these customers before they defected to ensure they established the habit of making bookings.

The Solution

Emailcenter set-up a number of emails that are automatically triggered at appropriate points throughout the customer lifecycle. These include when a customer joins the site, after a failed booking or a period of time where there have been no bookings.
Each message is automatically generated and specific to the customers point in their lifecycle, including a series of educational welcome messages, booking guarantee messages for failed bookings or a free meal promotion for those who have not made a booking in the last 6 weeks.
In addition, many customers had the perception that toptable was a London only site, which reduced its potential usage. To address this, each email now includes 3 offers from the customers own home town or county.

toptable newsletter

Results

These lifecycle emails resulted in an immediate uplift in winning back the defected customers. Booking rates for defected diners jumped by 1,600% compared to the newsletter. There was also a 400% increase in defected customers becoming loyal regular bookers. Booking rates for new customers receiving the educational welcome emails increased by 10% within the first 3 months of using toptable. Costs were also reduced as free meal promotions to the entire database reduced from a frequency of every 4-6 weeks to one every few months.